Trauma of Afghanistan Would Block Soviet Role in Gulf, Gorbachev Aide Says

Following the social trauma of the war in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union would not be able to send troops to a war in the Persian Gulf, one of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s top foreign policy aides said Saturday.

Georgi Shakhnazarov, who is one of Gorbachev’s closest advisers, said in an interview that neither the legislature nor the general public would tolerate a “military adventure” less than two years after the February, 1989, withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“It’s the same situation as when the United States just finished the war in Vietnam,” Shakhnazarov said. “If (the gulf crisis) had happened then, certainly the Congress would have banned military involvement by the U.S. anywhere else in the world. The Supreme Soviet would never give Gorbachev the OK to send troops to the gulf.”

He continued: “At the moment, Soviet society has developed such a strong allergy to military adventures that if you ran an opinion poll, you’d probably find that no more than half of 1% of the people are in favor of sending in Soviet troops.”

The Soviet Union’s nine-year battle to prop up Afghanistan’s Communist government left nearly 15,000 Soviet soldiers dead and has contributed to antipathy by many Soviets toward having their sons sent even to other parts of the country. Last year, Russian women protested having their sons conscripted to help put down nationalist uprisings in Soviet Azerbaijan.

Shakhnazarov said he was speaking personally, but such senior officials in the Soviet hierarchy rarely contradict policy in on-the-record interviews. Still, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze said in New York on Friday that “everyone should know that we will not hesitate to use force to protect our citizens” still in Iraq.

There are still 3,300 Soviet citizens in Iraq, and Gorbachev has accused Baghdad of stalling on a promise to free them. The Soviet Union voted for last week’s U.N. Security Council resolution giving Iraq until Jan. 15 to withdraw from Kuwait or face the use of force.